by Chris DeRose
Some newspapers took the novel position that Teresa was an adult who had done as she wanted.
The Philadelphia Despatch wrote: “There may have been instances where young and artless girls, in their pure and trusting confidence, have been heartlessly seduced and betrayed. But in nine cases out of ten what are called seductions are caused by the ill-governed passions and advances of the women. It is convenient, after the shame has been made public, for the guilty one to allege that she was seduced.”3
The Baltimore Sun agreed: “She can hardly be said to fall—she steps aside of her own free will and sins deliberately.”4
Chapter Twenty
Revenge of the Keys
* * *
“The friends of Mr. Key will leave no stone unturned to vindicate his memory, by showing that he did not deserve his fate.”
—Washington Evening Star
Benjamin Perley Poore, correspondent of the Boston Journal, reported: “Key has warm friends who will endeavor to cast obloquy on the past character of both Mr. and Mrs. Sickles, in which they will be joined by the faction of New York politicians opposed to him.” The “first families of Maryland are striving hard to so arrange matters that Mr. Sickles will be convicted of murder.”1
The Keys hired investigators to dive into Sickles’s past and discredit witnesses for the defense. Their counteroffensive soon appeared in the newspapers: “All the chimney sweepers of the earth might run against [Sickles] without dirtying him, and would come off the worse themselves from the collision.”
There were allegations of infidelity: “If Mr. Sickles had been shot thrice for every lady he has been too well acquainted with, what an expenditure of powder and ball! Would he not have resembled a perforated pin cushion?”
They claimed he had “Not the courage of a duelist but of an assassin.”2
The Baltimore Exchange defended Key as “a man wholly incapable of plotting or accomplishing the ruin of any woman. Mrs. Sickles’s paramour, it is possible, he may have been—but her seducer, never.”3
They claimed that Sickles had been censured by the New York Assembly for Fanny White’s visit. This has been repeated uncritically in nearly every biography of Daniel Sickles, but it isn’t true. The Journal of the Assembly of New York records every vote of the seventieth legislature and no motions for censure, against Sickles or anyone else, appear.
There were rumors that Sickles had brought Fanny to London and presented her to Queen Victoria as the wife of James Gordon Bennett. Again, Sickles’s enemies as well as his biographers found this too good to verify. Only eight women were presented to Queen Victoria during Buchanan’s tenure. All were presented by either the Countess of Clarendon or Harriet Lane. As a man, Sickles could not make a presentation.4
In the midst of unprecedented press coverage and public interest, the overcrowded wake, and dueling newspaper articles, there were friends of Key who were trying simply to grieve. Jesse Benton Fremont wrote a friend: “I think I knew Barton in his true and best nature—he was a truly loving and good husband and father and his cruel death came to me with a shock that few could have. Whatever Barton did at the last, his wife was loved and made happy to a degree very few women ever reach. I know them so well and I see plainly she was most happy and beloved.
It seems to me that Mr. Sickles talked too much before acting and acted with a due regard for safety when he did act and the extracting a written confession before two women witnesses from a woman in her state of mind and in the family way was an accumulation of heartless cruelties that show a character to justify his wife’s looking elsewhere for something to love.”5
The New York Herald, which had once been Sickles’s bitterest critic, found sympathy with him: “It is beyond denial, that whatever may be alleged against [his] early career, his conduct since his advent in Washington has been beyond blame or suspicion. He has never been seen in loose or disorderly company, has never frequented doubtful places, or been known to be engaged in amorous intrigues of any kind. On the contrary, he has sought the best society, has given close and laborious attention to his political duties, and was steadily obtaining a solid and commanding position in social and public life.”6
This sentiment was echoed in the Times: “Few men, I presume, including even the editors of the Evening Post, would like to have their past lives rummaged, and all the[ir] indiscretions . . . dragged forth in such an hour as this, which has overtaken Mr. Sickles . . . no one in Washington can say that he has ever seen him even in a gambling house, which here is the favorite fashionable resort of men,” or a “bar room.”
“His whole soul appeared to be centered on ambition, the advancement of his political adherents in New York, and the cultivation of a happy domestic life. To his parliamentary duties he was scrupulously attentive, and he was considered by many, among others by the speaker, as the ablest member of the present house.”
And not to take these attacks lying down, Sickles’s camp made public a letter from Antonio Bagioli, his father-in-law, who had arrived in Washington: “You have heaped on my child affection, kindness, devotion, generosity. You have been a good son, a true friend, and a devoted, kind loving husband and father.”7
Chapter Twenty-One
Beekman Returns
Thursday, March 3, 1859
The Washington correspondent of the Tribune unearthed a major story. “One is certain of nothing in this scandal loving city,” he wrote, “but the few facts which I subjoin are, I believe, authentic,” from “persons likely to know,” and “corroborated.”
“A Mr. B. of New York, whose name it is unnecessary to give in full, being a rather susceptible young man, last session fell violently in love with Mrs. Sickles. He soon became jealous of District-Attorney Key, and watched him.” He then told an abbreviated version of the Beekman story that ended with Sickles throwing him out of his house.1
Stuart responded in the Times, “The Mr. B. referred to is a Mr. Beekman, of New York.” Stuart denied that Sickles was abusive to Beekman. Key “obtained, under what influences I know not, an entire retraction.” Beekman excused himself “upon the ground that he was drunk, and knew not what he said. Unless Mr. Sickles had been predetermined to believe that the wife to whom he was so devoted was utterly unworthy of his love, how could he have harbored suspicion of her under such circumstances?”2
Stephen Beekman responded in the New York Times to “several very erroneous statements calculated to do my character great injury.” He put the blame squarely on Bacon, who he did not name and referred to as “a clerk in the Interior Department.” He claimed that Bacon took him aside and asked him his thoughts on Key’s attention toward Teresa. He admitted to “several trifling jokes about the female sex in general, and about her.” He claimed to have no suspicions as to Teresa and Key, a position he maintained when summoned to Sickles’s house or when he received a letter from Key demanding to know what he’d said.
The Tribune reporter also found Key’s statement of last summer, hoping for a French intrigue with a good bit of spice and danger. Laura Crawford Jones wrote in her diary: “Poor fellow! He had his wish—the danger was greater than he thought.”3
Advertisers used the tragedy to get the public’s attention. One company alleged to be the bug repellent that had cleaned up Sickles’s cell: “WHOLESALE DEATH AT THE JAIL, dead cockroaches, bed bugs, and other vermin [lay] in thousands all over the floor,” at the hands of “Schwerin’s Annihilating Powder: the only sure remedy for extermination.”4
A Philadelphia clothier claimed that they had sold Sickles “an elegant suit,” to “make as respectable an appearance as possible upon his trial.”
Then there were ads that simply referenced the case in a headline: THE SICKLES TRIAL—“It is a fact, and no humbug, that if you want to buy a good article of ready made clothing, very cheap, go to M. Bohm’s Washington Clothing Store.”5
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sickles in the Pulpit
Sunday, March 6, 1859
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* * *
“In the streets, the law courts, public houses, private dwellings, and, in fact everywhere, it was the prominent topic of conversation.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Henry Ward Beecher was the pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. An abolitionist, he had sent rifles to Kansas (“Beecher’s Bibles”) and ran a prominent stop on the Underground Railroad. It was the first Sunday since the shooting. Pastors like Beecher in pulpits like Plymouth would finally have their say on what their congregations had been talking about all week.
Sickles, Beecher thought, “has made himself obnoxious to the laws of his country” and “to the judgments of God.”
Out of this boiling and uneasy crater, just now comes a fiery flash, a rain of mud, and black clouds, full of sound and bolts hang about it. Pride has reached forth a hand of lust, and vanity has clasped it. Then comes assassination to destroy the guilty plight. The papers are loaded down with the matter. There is not a hamlet or ranch on the continent in which this sore of depravity is not about to drop its ichor.1
The Pennsylvanian thought Beecher was no better than the press:
Many of the flash preachers are going to preach sermons on Sunday upon the Washington tragedy which is thus a windfall for the cloth, as well as the sensation newspapers. Parson Beecher . . . scolds the press for giving publicity to criminal transactions, but he has no qualms in preaching on a love and murder affair if it will but fill Plymouth Church—as doubtless it will—to its utmost capacity.
The Tribune agreed:
Had we barely published on Monday, the fact that the Hon. Dan Sickles had the day before shot dead in the streets of Washington his intimate personal and political friend, the US District Attorney, and that a well-grounded jealousy was the sole incitement to this crime, we apprehend that our Reverend patron would not have been able to finish his breakfast with that deliberation and calmness which is dictated by the laws alike of hygiene and good breeding, owing to his haste to run around the corner and buy a Herald, containing the painfully interesting particulars of this shocking affair. [We] feel it incumbent on us to shield our esteemed patron from this odious necessity.2
Reverend Haley told his congregation: the “Sickles affair was the natural result of our social condition. It is an undeniable fact that most women who come here and launch into hotel and fashionable life do not escape scandal.’ ” He had heard that members of Congress leave their wives at home for that very reason.3
On the day of the shooting, a handful of people had been near Lafayette Square. Today, before, after, and instead of church, over 1,000 people milled about, taking in the crime scene. Artists for the illustrated newspapers were sketching the Ewell House, the Club House, and the square. The bark of the tree that Key hid behind was quickly disappearing at the hands of souvenir seekers. One eagle-eyed visitor saw the mark made by a pistol and carved out a block of wood with the ball inside. It was official: no scene was sacred.4
Chapter Twenty-Three
Aria
Tuesday, March 8, 1859
* * *
“No event that has happened for many years will occasion more wide spread excitement.”
—Daily Standard
Alice Key Pendleton waited on a train platform with her brother’s four children, ages four to twelve; her own two; and the two of her widowed sister on their way to Ohio. The Star said that their “chief sympathy” was with these children, who will be “through life as intense sufferers from this affair as any others.” They are also “the only parties concerned in it who had no agency whatever in bringing it about.”1
William Stuart wandered the city of Washington as members made their way out of town. “Our city has now put on its provincial garb,” he wrote, “and now appears to be nothing more than a large country town.” The departure of Congress and arrival of Lent “have disrobed the metropolis of her proud, flaunting, and important air.”2
Stuart saw Chevalier Wikoff on Pennsylvania Avenue and at Willard’s “discussing the topic of the hour with that mixture of philosophy and pathos which renders his conversation at once so luminously clear and so mystically profound.
“Two more dull and dreary days than the 7th and 8th of March have seldom fallen even on this chosen home of dullness and dreariness,” he wrote. “The rain had not the spirit to come down boldly and have done with it, but sneaked down in a stealthy drizzle to the earth.” Umbrella sellers and cab drivers “leered triumphant.” Carriages “floundered like so many arks along the swamp, miscalled street, of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
An Irishwoman with “five prospective little American citizens” sold oranges and oysters at the gate to the Capitol, her last day before closing for the season.
Congress may have closed, but the Capitol bar was open, crowded with “lawyers, politicians, journalists, schemers, dreamers, lobbyists, land-jobbers, slave-dealers, filibusters, reformers, congressmen . . . all more or less drunk.” Upstairs in the drawing room, there was “a bevy of lazy looking ladies lolling in voluptuous rocking chairs, some self-complacent, some helpless and harassed with the die-away disorder of ennui, some cynical and scoffing, but all prettily dressed and borrowing from the enchantment of distance the indescribable look of the ‘lady.’ ”
“The all-engrossing topic of the hour,” Stuart wrote, “naturally enough, is the Sickles tragedy, and the smallest detail connected with any of the parties is still caught up with eager curiosity and rapt attention.”3
They discussed the identity of “R. B. G.” There was rumor of a letter sent to Key on the same day, warning him of danger and urging him to quit the affair. Newspapers reported they were the work of a woman “who was jealous of [Key’s] attentions to Mrs. Sickles.”4
There was also the matter of Key’s gun. “Few men in Washington do go so unarmed, and Mr. Key had received but the Thursday before a letter warning him of the danger of discovery and of the risks involved in it.” Sickles himself seemed surprised that Key reached into his coat and came out with nothing but an opera glass. The consensus seemed to be that Key had changed clothes, fatefully forgetting his weapon. Key “had gone constantly armed for ten days previously.” It was thought he left his pistol in another coat.5
The Boston Traveler concluded that “Men shouldn’t change their clothes on a Sunday . . . If [Key] had been armed, Sickles probably would have been killed.” But “as it is, the end may come at the end of a rope.”6
Stuart continued his trips to see the man of the hour. “Mr. Sickles does not look well,” he wrote. Mental suffering and confinement within a prison’s walls have tolled severely upon him, paling his cheek and shaking his vigorous constitution.”7
Sickles tried to limit his visitors to his closest friends and his lawyers. He passed long hours pacing the corridor of the prison “in silent grief.” He pressed his head between his hands, as if trying to disappear from the world. Most of the time he wanted to say nothing of his reason for being there. Sometimes he would repeat: “I could not live on the same globe with a man who had thus dishonored me.” Sickles tore his hair and lamented the fate of his wife and daughter.
Sickles was visited separately by his parents and Teresa’s parents. His mother fainted, while Teresa’s mother became frantic, sending him into tears.8
Sickles had spent ten nights in his “close and stifling” cell, but the worst part was being cut off from his daughter. He did not want Laura to see this place. But now Teresa was well enough to travel and would be headed for New York on the next morning’s train. Sickles asked for Laura to come to him.9
“At first the joy of seeing her father engrossed her attention, but soon the strange appearance of things excited her childish wonder.” Laura took in the whitewashed walls and the brick floor. The narrow sleeping cot was less than their servants had. The window had a row of iron bars.
Why haven’t you come home? Laura asked.
Sickles replied that he had “a great deal of work to do,
and cannot leave at present.”
Are you coming with mamma and Laura to New York in the morning? Laura asked, slipping into third person.
Not now, but he hoped to see her soon.
Laura asked a hundred “puzzled and excited” questions, which Sickles answered. But “some dark foreboding seemed to fall upon her delicate soul, as if the very proximity of a prison and criminals shocked the purity which could not even comprehend the meaning of crime, for suddenly her fair little face became troubled, and her beautiful large dark eyes filled with tears that multiplied and flowed freely down her cheeks, and, when the fountain was exhausted, were replaced by sobs.”
Laura could not explain her sudden sadness and probably did not understand it herself. Sickles handed her a small bouquet of flowers that he had managed to get his hands on. He then watched Laura disappear from sight, not knowing when or whether he would see her again.10
Thursday, March 10, 1859
In the early hours of the morning, Teresa, along with her mother, Laura, and two friends, left her home for the first time since the shooting. She had been among the most public of women in the city. Now she was sneaking away with the last minutes of darkness. She walked from her house to the carriage, rode to the train depot, and left Washington for the last time. She had wanted to see her husband, but Sickles was resolute. Such a meeting, he said, “could only inflict torture upon all parties.” Teresa and Laura would stay at their home in Manhattan, on the Hudson.11
Postmaster General Aaron Brown was in “critical condition.” This was bad news for Sickles, as the death of a cabinet member would suspend government operations and further delay his trial. After several days of being sick with pneumonia, he began hemorrhaging and wasn’t expected to survive the night. The president and cabinet were with him when he died in the early morning hours of March 10. Thousands gathered in the East Room to watch the body lie in state. The houses of the capital were draped in black. Except for one “desolate” house “on the west side of Lafayette Square,” wrote Stuart, “where ambition, love and elegance so lately had its home and its resource.”12